nt_manbeer

Personally, I'd rather change a bogie than start hacking bits off and epoxying new bits on. And I'm not impatient - I'm still laying track at the moment! Chris

Hello, I've read through this thread, and can't find whether any list is available. I have a collection of Collett coaches, mine don't seem to have NEM pockets. The Rapido coupler looks as though it goes through the bracket with a "T" end and a spring behind it. If the Collett bogies changed at some point, is it possible to get hold of the new pattern bogies as a spare part and are they interchangeable? If they are (or can be made available) then I can change bogies to allow me to fit the new couplers. I have a pack of couplers, but haven't been able to find anything to fit them to. The only ones I've fitted are to a Dapol Hall and an NGS Stove R. So I have a pair to test, but I want to change loads more so that I can really use them. Thanks Chris

I have a couple of the Dapol signal, and they seem very good. Thanks are due, IMHO, to Dapol for producing them. Having read through this thread, I have a couple of opinions to express. FIrstly, the question of variants of signals. Whilst it seems that Dapol are receptive to bringing out more types, it has got to be inevitable that not everyone is going to be able to get their ideal signal - the potential market would not justify Dapol's outlay. As someone else says, if we get single post, left and right brackets, in all the Big Four railways, we should consider ourselves lucky! Personally, I'd also like to see three way bracket and combined Home/Distant. In GWR, of course Secondly, the vexed question of control. As someone who intends to use DCC to control them, personally I would have preferred some way of selecting a particular aspect (on or off). As the system has a power input and a single input to trigger a flip-flop inside it, it can not have been much of a job to have made the input drive the signal state directly, rather than via the flip-flop. I'm imagining that the chip in the signal base will be some sort of micro-controller like a PIC chip, and so a firmware change would have made the signal work differently, at very little cost. Yes, it appears that MERG have produced a different PCB that works in the more DCC friendly way. However, it is because I don't want to spend hours on each signal that I welcome the arrival of a RTP product. I do have the skills to do it, but why would I want to spend my spare time doing what I do all day at work? BUT, having said all that, I would not want to berate Dapol for having produced what they have. I will be able to use a relay on the output of an accessory decoder as someone previously has said they have done successfully. So no big deal, as far as I'm concerned. Who knows, maybe if Dapol sell thousands of these things, some British company like CML Electronics will produce a decoder specially for the job! And yes, with semaphore signals, the signalman is supposed to observe that the signal is showing the correct aspect after he/she moves a lever. Things like the temperature of the day rooutinely effect the mechanical system by allowing the wire to expand or contract. If the signal is out of view from the signalbox, because of an intervening overbridge, for example, then a repeater is fitted to the signal arm that displays the signal aspect in the signalbox. On colour light signals, the same thing is always done by checking the current through the signal lamp (this also detects a "bulb gone"). Cheers Chris